BRITISH PRIME MINISTER David Cameron is facing a revolt within Conservative Party ranks following the overwhelming defeat of a motion to hold a referendum concerning the UK ‘s membership of the European Union.
Yesterday, 483 lawmakers voted against and 111 voted in favour of the motion to permit the country to vote on whether to stay in EU, renegotiate its treaty with Brussels, or remain a member on the current terms.
The government had ordered its lawmakers to vote against the referendum, and said those who backed it would face disciplinary action. Even if the motion had been passed, however, the government was not legally obliged to hold such a referendum.
Cameron argued that it was the wrong time to have a discussion about leaving the EU: “Legislating now for a referendum, including on whether Britain should leave the EU, could cause great uncertainty and could actually damage our prospects of growth,” he said.
Similarly, the Foreign Secretary William Hague – himself a self-confessed ‘euro sceptic’ – yesterday backed the defeat of the motion, saying that it was posing “the wrong question at the wrong time”.
But their words were not happily received by all members of the party: the BBC reports that, in total, 81 Tory MPs defied the whips, two actively abstained, and it is unknown how a further 12 voted.
Conservative lawmaker Adam Holloway resigned his unpaid post as an aide to Europe minister David Lidington so he could vote in favor of a referendum. ”If you can’t support a particular policy then the honest course of action is of course to stand down, and I want decisions to be made more closely by the people they affect, by local communities, not upwards towards Brussels,” Holloway announced to cheers in the chamber.
Education secretary Michael Gove downplayed the rebellion during an interview with BBC Radio 4′s Today programme this morning, saying that the tensions within the party were being “exaggerated”. Gove insisted that the public display of defiance towards Cameron by backbenchers was “not a humiliation”.
“The backbenchers believed that the precise motion that they put forward and the precise referendum which they argued for was the way to do it. I respectfully disagreed with them,” he said.
However, the deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has been less equivocal in his comments, condemning the backbench rebellion, the Guardian reports: ”We should stop tilting at windmills about threats and challenges which simply aren’t there right now. Let’s get on with the difficult job of working with our eurozone partners to fix the eurozone, because, let’s face it, unless you’ve got a strong, prosperous eurozone, you can’t have a strong, prosperous United Kingdom,” Clegg said.
Labour leader Ed Miliband labelled yesterday’s vote as a humiliation for Cameron, saying: “If he can’t win the argument with his own backbenchers, how can the country have confidence that he can win the arguments that matter for Britain?”
Additional reporting by the AP
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